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On the Articulation of Marxist and Non-Marxist Theory in Colonial Historiography

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On the Articulation of Marxist and Non-Marxist Theory in Colonial Historiography On the articulation of Marxist and non-Marxist theory in Colonial Historiography. Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital George Steinmetz Forthcoming in Journal of World System Research (2014) Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital is an important book on a topic of major importance for all of the human and social sciences. The book’s implications reach far beyond Chibber’s critique of subaltern studies, which is his most obvious focus. Chibber’s overarching argument is twofold: capitalism does universalize itself to the colonial and postcolonial world, but at the same time, capitalism does not permeate or encompass all other aspects of social practice. As it stands, this is already an important argument for social theory generally and not just for analysts working on former colonies like India. The crisis of what used to be called western Marxism led to two main responses among Marxists. While many simply abandoned Marxism, becoming “post-Marxist,”1 others became “neo-orthodox,” refusing to acknowledge the autonomy of any social practices from capitalism.2 Chibber’s position is closer to the more nuanced positions of the “regulationist” school3; it is also compatible with a neo-historicist critical realism4 that combines an ontology of emergent causal powers with an anti-essentialist epistemology according to which historically varying conjunctures of causal mechanisms interact in contingent, often unpredictable ways to produce empirical events. The fact that Chibber’s book’s packaging suggests an all-out assault on anyone who would dare to deviate Marxist orthodoxy does not square with the actual content of the book. Chibber’s book is also framed as a critique of Subaltern colonial historiography. Here again, the book’s framing does not provide an accurate sense of the directions in which Chibber’s thinking takes him. Many of Chibber’s specific arguments are broadly consistent with the path-breaking work of the founder of Subaltern Studies, Ranajit Guha. Chibber’s argument restated Chibber’s book is presented as a critique of postcolonial theory. This is very misleading. The leading postcolonial theorists, including Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and 1 Laclau, E. & Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Verso, London. 2 Postone, M. (1993). Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory. New York: Cambridge University Press. 3 E.g. Bob Jessop, “Zur Relevanz von Luhmanns Staatstheorie und von Laclau und Mouffes Diskursanalyse für die Weiterentwicklung der marxistischen Staatstheorie,” pp. 157-179 in Joachim Hirsch, John Kannakulam, and Jens Wissel, eds., Der Staat der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Nomos, 2008). 4 On neo-historicist social epistemology see my “Charles Tilly, historicism, and the critical realist philosophy of science,” American Sociologist, volume 41, number 4, 2010, pp. 312-336; on critical realism in this context see my “Critical Realism and Historical Sociology.” Comparative Studies in Society and History volume 40, number 1, pp. 170-186. 1 Leela Gandhi, are barely mentioned here.5 Also missing are postcolonial theory’s adopted predecessors, such W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and Albert Memmi, or its philosophical antecedents, including Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger. Postcolonial theory started and remains most firmly embedded in the humanities, not the social sciences or history. The two main strands of postcolonial theory have focused on questions of the colonial presence within ostensibly noncolonial cultural texts and practices, on the ambivalences of colonized subjectivity and colonial forms of rule, and on the ways colonizing ideas have prepared the ground for conquest and foreign rule. None of these themes shows up in Chibber’s book.6 Instead the book’s exclusive focus is the Subaltern School of history, which has very different origins even if there has been a subsequent rapprochement. A more accurate title for this book would be something like The Subaltern School of History and the Spectre of Capital. That said, Chibber does make a highly coherent argument, one that can be restated in four main theses: 1. Capitalism universalizes itself both geospatially and within a given social formation. 2. Capitalism is entirely compatible with political despotism, labor coercion, and the production and reproduction of cultural difference and diversity. 3. Although capital may “spread[] to all corners of the world, … this does not mean that it manages to subordinate all social relations to its particular rules of reproduction” (p. 217).7 4. Although “it is surely problematic to see capital lurking behind every social phenomenon,” it is no less problematic “to deny its salience when it is in fact a relevant causal agent” (p. 123). Chibber’s analysis of the Subaltern School In addition to these general theoretical arguments, Chibber shows that there are three key arenas in which the Subaltern School claims that Indian history differs from Western history: (1) First, they claim that the Indian bourgeoisie failed to become hegemonic; (2) Second, they argue for a unique form of “power relations” in India; and (3) third, they argue that India has a unique “political psychology.” There are three main historians under discussion here: Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. In this section I will present these three main clusters of ideas and arguments. 5 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978); Idem., Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993); Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); Gayati Spivak, G. “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” pp. 271-316 in C Nelson and L Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (London: Macmillan, 1988); Idem, In Other Worlds (NY: Routledge, 1988); Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anti-Colonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). For an excellent overview see Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 6 George Steinmetz, “Decolonizing German Theory: An Introduction,” Postcolonial Studies 9:1 (2006), pp. 3-13. 7 All references in the text, unless otherwise stated, to Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital (London: Verso, 2013) 2 I. Capital’s mythical universalizing mission The first argument, associated with R. Guha, is that capital abandoned its putative universalizing hegemonic mission in colonial and postcolonial India. Chibber counters that the bourgeoisie is not inherently liberal or modernizing and that capitalism is not the same thing as political and cultural modernization. Since the two key comparison cases for Guha, Britain and France, did not really have bourgeois revolutions of the idealized sort there is no reason we should expect India to have had them. Indeed, Chibber continues, cultural and political forms of modernization were in some respects more readily forthcoming after the relevant comparable revolution, decolonization, in India than in Western Europe, This is a very familiar debate for a German historian. The thesis of the German Sonderweg, or special path to modernity, asked why Nazism came to power in Germany and not in other advanced industrial countries. The basic answer focused on the deviation of Germany's developmental path from its Western neighbors. German history was seen as having been pushed repeatedly in destructive and anti-democratic directions by a clash between economic modernity and political and cultural backwardness, and this structural disjuncture resulted from the fact that German bourgeois liberalism was underdeveloped in comparison with Britain and France. Like the Indian bourgeoisie, the German bourgeoisie was said to have failed repeatedly to take the lead in promoting its supposed class interest in liberal democracy, in leading other classes toward that goal. Like the Indian bourgeoisie it failed to suppress the neo-feudal landed nobility, which continued to wield undue influence in politics and culture well into the twentieth century. Another feature of this condition was the so-called “feudalization of the bourgeoisie,” the spread of anti-modern cultural values such as conservative anti-capitalism, anti-urbanism, and “cultural pessimism,” and a non-hegemonic tendency to resort to state violence that is extremely reminiscent of Guha’s diagnosis of the Indian condition.8 Guha was relying on a version of Marxist political theory and German history that was demolished by the critics of the Sonderweg thesis. Chibber argues convincingly that real capitalism is compatible with a whole range of non-democratic political and cultural conditions, and that there is no normal set of accompaniments to the spread of capitalism. No historian of fascist Europe, Assad’s Syria, or contemporary China should raise an eyebrow at this claim nowadays. II. Labor discipline, abstract labor, and cultural homogenization Chibber argues secondly that capitalism is compatible with phsyical coercion at the point of production and that that it produces and reproduces cultural heterogeneity (or “concrete identities”) among its workers rather that necessarily pushing toward their homogenization. “It is rational for capitalists to dominate labor” in ways that reach far beyond the autonomatic, “dull 8 David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (New York: Oxford University
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